Ricerc@Sapienza

I shall focus on the Epicurean notions of justice, law, and the philosophical community. By carefully examining Epicurus’s Principle Doctrines (especially 31-40) as well as some sentences of the Gnomologium Vaticanum, I want to reconstruct a reliable picture of both the ‘relativity’ of justice and the role of law. Since justice is not physei, Epicurus insists that to dikaion can be only thought of as an agreement rooted in mutual human dealings, which should therefore always be considered in its strict relationship with what is useful, since it has a strong yet exclusively symbolic value.